The Charlotte News
Wednesday, December 29, 1937
EDITORIAL
If They Had These--
Whoever will look at a map of China just now will discover that the Japanese armies are spread out over an astonishing area. From Peking to Canton is all of 1500 miles, even as the crow flies. And from Shanghai to Hankow, by the windings of the valley of the Yangtze-kiang--the only available route--is 700 more. Furthermore, seven provincial capitals are in Japanese hands, and each requires an army to occupy it. And further still, the Nipponese are said to be keeping an army of 600,000 men on the Manchurian border to guard against sudden attack by Russia.
All of which ought to mean, under the rules of warfare as we dimly know them, that we'll wake up one of these days to find that the Chinese have cut off various of these armies and annihilated them. For the lines here are obviously too thin to be safe. But alas, we regret to report that it's our opinion that no such news is likely to arrive. Because the Chinese armies are poorly trained and poorly armed and poorly fed? Not wholly good merry gentlemen, for it is of record that there was once another army in the world, poorly trained, poorly armed, and surpassingly poorly fed, which yet succeeded in bottling up and destroying several well-trained, armed and fed armies, which were much more cautiously disposed than the Japanese have been.
What the Chinese obviously need, in brief, is a first-class strategist like Stonewall Jackson, a first-class organizer like Lee, a first-class captain or two like Stuart and Forrest. These and some thousands of the dangedest fighting men ever heard of, honing and hollering for a scrap.
Men like Jonas (Charley) and Meekins (William M.) and Charlotte's Jake Newell declare the Democratic Party has been submerged and drowned under a new bureaucracy known as the New Deal. They allege that the only place for real Democrats with Jeffersonian memories is within the ranks of a new Republican Party.
We picked up that from a story written by one of our reporters--and proceed to observe, hmmn! And a couple of hmmns further.
The way for a good Jeffersonian--by definition a free-trading, agrarian, anti-Federal, States' Rights decentralist--to rescue himself, you'll note, is for him to join up with the party of Aleck Hamilton, which has been precisely the party of high tariff, Big Business, and Federal centralization!
It sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland to us. And if that weren't enough mixed up to get you dizzy, consider also that these gentlemen who deliver this pronouncement are all men of mainly provincial prominence in the councils of the Republican Party. And that it is just in regard to the local situation in North Carolina.
Framed Edition
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